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Most people are familiar with the story of Jonah or at least the part of him being swallowed by a great fish. The short, four chapter book is loaded with life lessons about running from God, disobedience, self-pity and racism. It’s seasoned with theological nuances which range from cosmic sovereignty to interpersonal relatability along the rails of God’s compassion and grace toward all people and animals. Each of these subjects would be a great place to camp and contemplate, but today, we go to verses 7-9 in chapter two:
When my life was fainting away,
I remembered the Lord,
and my prayer came to you,
into your holy temple.
8 Those who pay regard to vain idols
forsake their hope of steadfast love.
9 But I with the voice of thanksgiving
will sacrifice to you;
what I have vowed I will pay.
Salvation belongs to the Lord!”
If I read these verses isolated from the story, we’d be hard pressed to distinguish them from a Psalm of David. Clearly Jonah isn’t a spiritual noob. He’s speaking from experiential knowledge, he knows his prayer is finding God. Jonah is familiar with that “being in the temple” experience, which if you have experienced it, is a life altering experience of being loved back by the one all powerful invisible God. That experience reorients reality. It reorders our agendas and actions.
That experience is Jonah’s Thanksgiving…gratitude…complete satisfaction.
I could stop here and we’d have enough for our Thanksgiving contemplations, but my hermeneutical process mandates I read everything in context, and this opens up deeper contemplation and discovery which I bring to you today.
The context is:
- These three verses reside within a prayer.
- The prayer resides within a period ofJonah’s life where he is rebelling against God’.
- Jonah’s rebellion resides within the belly of a great fish.
- The prayer occurred three days after being swallowed.
Jonah was so content to be on a boat going as far as he could from God, that he was asleep during a massive storm, which only became worse as those around jettisoned their cargo. Jonah’s “Thankful” slumber caused others to suffer loss. Jonah knows God and His power and for the sake of the crew, he tells them to “Pick me up and hurl me into the sea; then the sea will quiet down for you, for I know it is because of me that this great tempest has come upon you.” Jonah is ready to die. He’s accepting the consequences of his rebellion, he’s not disputing, there is no “self preservation” strategy.
Certainly it can’t get worse than being thrown into the sea. At least drowning is a relatively quick death. We know he’s swallowed by the fish, but I’m guessing he blacked out. One moment he’s got “weeds wrapped around his head” (2:5), the next he’s alive in what must have been a highly constrictive, smelly, soggy, environment with just enough air to bring about consciousness.
That’s the context of Jonah’s Thanksgiving.
Apparently things can get worse than a quick death, now he faces a slow, conscious death of being dissolved and digested. I contemplate how cramped it was. Was one arm awkwardly dislocated or bent upward? Regardless, this was Jonah’s “temple experience.” This is the place his knows his prayer is heard. All of Jonah’s Thanksgiving experience is that of being loved back, in the midst of a slow, smelly, constricted, death.
This will be our contemplation for our Thanksgiving.
Traditionally, we gather around and offer thanks for what we have, and that is right to do. We do have a lot. Yet nothing of what we have today will be here in a few hundred years. Jonah’s Thanksgiving experience is essentially eternal. How can we access that? How do we hear the “I love you” within our rebellion, or in the midst of being digested by the great fish which swallow us? In the gut and bile surrounding these dark depths, there are no candles to light, no musicians playing, no preacher preaching, and like Jonah, we are far beyond the reach of any religion.
We are left only with the consciousness of “Being loved back”…that’s where Thanksgiving starts.
Like Jonah, as we fade in and out of conscious awareness, as we perceive graver realities brought about by our rebellion, there is only one remaining practice so long as there remains any consciousness at all…prayer. Contemplative prayer is the communion of a dying soul to his or her Source of life Itself. Once swallowed in our unholy, undignified, state of rebellious intention, where we think we’ve outrun the gaze of God, there is a regaining of who we are in our futility, a humbling in the context of who God is, and that is true Thanksgiving.
Thanksgiving is not merely gratitude for objects, it’s our souls deepest joy that we cannot, in our stupidity and pride, outrun the Subject who sustains us in love even as we reject Him. This “I love you” from our Maker is forever coming to us, like a great fish it is surrounding us and pressing in on us. Thanksgiving is when the conditions of our life awaken us to our rebellion, our prejudices, or our disassociation and dullness which allowed us to sleep during the storms of life, and skim over our harm to others. Thanksgiving reorients us again. Thanksgiving causes the necessary course corrections within our heart, which carry us outward…even unto the Nineveh’s that we despise.
Our “temple experience” awaits us as soon as we accept the futility of our running away, and welcome the “I love you too” of God, which is pressing through to us via our most grave realities. May we gain consciousness and join Jonah in his Thanksgiving today and always.
Thrive in Exile 